Why does Bates numbering work, and work well?
It works because as only a tiny fraction of items produced in discovery ever get used in court, you only need Bates stamp the set of documents that leaves your office for use in a proceeding. Documents that arrive at your office need not be stamped (they would be managed in your review tool; naturally we suggest MasterFile). And, although some law firms do Bates stamp everything that’s incoming with a unique document ID, let’s be clear: that’s not Bates stamping but simply a method of indexing.
Therefore, that tiny fraction of disclosures printed for use as exhibits, and paginated and Bates stamped, can be referenced by all parties by Bates number; between yourself and opposing counsel, native files are easily referred to by their file-level Bates like number, or other meta data like date and file type or author, and specific content.
It’s clear that native production won’t end the use of Bates numbers; neither will Bates numbers be displaced in the foreseeable future, or any time soon, as the simplicity of pinpointing material being discussed quickly by document number, page and line number is just hard to beat.
MasterFile gives you the ability to unitize native files and Bates stamp and endorse within itself. It generates PDF, TIF and native format disclosure sets automatically so you can easily and quickly respond to requests to produce in a timely manner. It tracks all productions so you can pinpoint any document in any production in two clicks. And when you do need on-page Bates stamping as the party producing documents for Court, there’s no need to print and stamp manually, nor the need to export documents to a separate program such as Acrobat for Bates stamping.